A native of Tennessee, Michael Lamb came to Wake Forest to create and develop a University-wide initiative to educate leaders of character. Michael spent a year meeting with faculty, staff, students and alumni to identify shared values and purposes, organizing pilot programming for students and raising support. Michael’s work led to the creation of the Program for Leadership and Character in 2017, a growing initiative at Wake Forest that cultivates the next generation of leaders to live “for humanity.”
Today, Michael is the senior executive director of the Program for Leadership and Character, the F. M. Kirby Foundation Chair of Leadership and Character, and associate professor of interdisciplinary humanities at Wake Forest University. A recipient of teaching awards from Princeton, Oxford and Wake Forest, Michael’s interdisciplinary teaching and research focus on leadership, character and the role of virtues in public life. He is the author of A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought and co-editor of The Arts of Leading: Perspectives from the Humanities and the Liberal Arts, Cultivating Virtue in the University and Everyday Ethics: Moral Theology and the Practices of Ordinary Life.
Prior to joining Wake Forest, Michael helped to launch The Oxford Character Project, where he remains an associate fellow, and served as dean of leadership, service, and character development for Rhodes Scholars. He is currently leading several major grants to educate leaders of character at Wake Forest and beyond, including through the Educating Character Initiative, which is catalyzing a broader community focused on character in higher education.